Armageddon Averted Armageddon Averted The Soviet Collapse, 1970–2000 STEPHEN KOTKIN 1 1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogotá Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Paris São Paulo Shanghai Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw with associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Stephen Kotkin 2001 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2001 All rights reserved. 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Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available ISBN 0–19–280245–3 13579108642 Typeset in New Baskerville by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., Guildford and King’s Lynn In memory of my great-grandfather Michael Korolewicz (1889–1969) who had been a teacher in tsarist Poland and in America built a chrome, silver, and gold plating business. He used to take me to the park, beginning when I was in a stroller, and talk history. Preface My first encounter with the Soviet bloc took place one summer in 1983. As a graduate student of Habsburg his- tory, I made my way to Prague from northern California to advance my language skills in pursuit of a bygone empire. On the day of my arrival in the capital of Bohemia, I dis- covered a mass ‘socialist peace rally’. Surprised to hear a familiar voice booming over the loudspeakers, I pushed my way through the crowd to the front, and sure enough it was him: the then socialist mayor of Berkeley. Socialism in the bloc turned out to be nothing like what I, as an American, had been led to believe. Rather than an ironclad dictatorship in a world completely unto itself, or an unremarkable system gradually converging with that of the West, it proved to be very different from the West yet increasingly penetrated by the West, and its highly rigid structures had to be constantly circumvented to make them function. It was full of incessant complaining but also thoroughgoing conformism, and had a relatively impoverished material culture but a richly engaging sociability. I made up my mind that, upon returning to the University of California, I would begin the study of Russian, and switch empires. These were the days of Polish Solidarity and its under- ground ‘flying universities’, which were hailed as ‘civil vii preface society’ triumphant, but one of my professors, a noted Frenchman, spent considerable effort urging me to use caution with the notion of ‘civil society’, which he called ‘the new ideology of the intellectual class’. Another pro- fessor, in French history, told me that civil society could not exist without private property. Two very fine professors of Russian history helped me get up to speed on a country I hardly knew. When perestroika suddenly broke in the Soviet Union, which of course did not have institutional- ized private property, I was saved from what American intellectuals made their principal (mis)interpretation of Soviet, and then Russian, developments, and instead puz- zled over the nature of the state and institutions, as well as Soviet categories of thought. My first trip to the Soviet Union took place in the sum- mer of 1984, the reign of Chernenko, for a Russian lan- guage programme in Leningrad, with side trips to Ukraine and to the site of the Big Three meeting during the Sec- ond World War to decide the fate of Europe—Yalta, where I got sick and threw up. In the years following that initial foray, I have been able to undertake very extensive travels, sometimes living for extended periods in the Soviet and the post-Soviet world, doing research in or familiarizing myself with every Soviet republic, except for Turkmeni- stan, and most countries in Eastern Europe, before and after 1989–91, as well as China and Japan. Mainly, I spent the years of Soviet and then Russian ‘reform’ researching and writing a two-volume, French-style ‘total history’ of the past and present of a Soviet steel town. viii preface From that rust-belt vantage point, it could not have been any more obvious that reform was collapse, and that the collapse would not be overcome for quite some time to come. Convinced well before 1991 that the ‘conservatives’ were right, that Soviet socialism and the Union were being (inadvertently) destroyed by Gorbachev’s perestroika, I had sought an audience and got it with the number two man in the Soviet hierarchy, Yegor Ligachev, in his office at Party HQ on Old Square. To be inside the Central Committee complex, whose history and intrigues I knew from reading, had a surreal quality. Beyond attaining the forbidden, I wanted to figure out why neither Ligachev nor anyone else at the top had tried to remove Gorbachev and undo the reforms. This exchange turned out to be one of several long meetings we ended up having, the rest taking place in the exclusive dacha com- pound of the top Soviet leadership, others of whom I also met. Here, too, was collapse. I shall never forget later escorting Ligachev around New York, demonstrating and explaining the vast universe of private small businesses and immigrant-run eateries for hours on end, only to have him ask over and over again who in the government was responsible for feeding the huge urban population. The world was as lucky in the pathetic, principled Ligachev as it was in the masterly, principled Gorbachev. Evicted, their place was taken by morally less promising people, who fought violently over the massive spoils of Communist-era offices, state dachas, ix preface apartment complexes, and vacation resorts. Making the rounds, I began to see that the best way to understand Russian politics was mostly to ignore the grand ‘reform’ programmes, which would soon be added to their pre- decessors already choking the archives, and instead closely to track prime real estate. Before 1991, I had made a point of inspecting the premises of the once almighty State Planning Commission (Gosplan) and State Supply Commission (Gossnab), which together had planned an economy over one-sixth of the earth. After 1991, I would go back, to see the new (and old), or reshuffled, inhabitants. In the chaos of pere- stroika, I also gained easy access to party headquarters in the republic capitals and many provinces; after these edi- fices had been renamed, I went back to find many of the people I had known, usually with higher positions, though not a few had moved laterally, and the provincials had often been elevated to the capital. And so it emerged that, just as social constituencies, whether in the rust belt or state bureaucracy, provided the keys to understanding the inherent limits to any proposed political programme, pat- terns of sociability afforded the keys to grasping the dynamics of power. Friends I had made while an exchange student at Moscow State University in the 1980s were, by the 1990s, in the Russian government or Kremlin, and the chance to share in their life trajectories and perspectives has been extremely illuminating. Lower down the social hierarchy, in 2000–1, I was equally privileged to carry out an eight- x preface month investigation of an ambitious volunteer initiative called the Civic Education Project. In fifteen countries, from Hungary to Kazakhstan, Estonia to Azerbaijan, my task, as a consultant for the Open Society Institute, entailed interviewing scores of university administrators, hundreds of academics, and thousands of students. It was, with a few exceptions, a grim inventory of a world, ten years after the Soviet collapse, still undergoing deep political and economic involution. But everywhere the university students proved to be a remarkable lot, multi-talented and auspiciously responsive to educational opportunities. Some of the material in this book first appeared in the New Republic, and I am extremely grateful to Leon Wieseltier for that opportunity. For similar reasons I would also like to thank the East European Constitutional Review and its editor, Stephen Holmes. Catherine Clarke of Oxford University Press commissioned the book and with Catherine Humphries and Hilary Walford guided it to completion. Tyler Felgenhauer compiled the index. Leonard Benardo, Laura Engelstein, Geoffrey Hosking, Sara Mosle, Philip Nord, Steven Solnick, Amir Weiner, and William Wohlforth offered incisive commentary on drafts of the text. Special thanks also to Princeton University’s Liechtenstein Institute on Self-Determination, directed by Wolfgang Danspeckgruber, and to the National Council for East European and Eurasian Research in Washington, DC, for support of research and writing. I love my wife, Soyoung Lee, so much I can barely say. xi Contents Preface vii Note on the text xiv List of plates xv List of maps xvii Introduction 1 1 History’s cruel tricks 10 2 Reviving the dream 31 3 The drama of reform 58 4 Waiting for the end of the world 86 5 Survival and cannibalism in the rust belt 113 6 Democracy without liberalism? 142 7 Idealism and treason 171 Notes 197 Further reading 233 Index 237 xiii Note on the text All translations from Russian sources are the author’s.